Lynda Plante - Blind Fury

Anna headed toward the victim, carefully moving from plate to plate as if using stepping stones. There were two flags positioned where the van driver had stood, a few feet from the body, and the closer Anna got, she could see that from his position on the motorway’s hard shoulder, he would not have been able to see the body.

The dead girl lay on her right side, half in and half out of the ditch, one arm outstretched as if she were trying to claw her way free. Her left leg was crooked over her right, again appearing as if she had tried to climb out of the ditch. She was, as Mike had suggested, very young; her long red hair, worn in a braid, was similar in color to Anna’s. The girl was wearing a pink T-shirt, a denim miniskirt, and a denim bomber jacket with a bright pink lining and an unusual embroidered motif of silver flowers on the front pocket. She wore one white sandal. There was no handbag and, from their initial search, nothing that could identify her.

Anna returned to Mike, who by now had a cup of coffee in his hand.

“You say you’ve had two previous cases?” she asked quietly.

“Not me personally. I had the most recent, but the first was a couple of years ago. So then we also took on the first discovery as a possible linked double murder. If this has the same MO, that’ll make three.”

“Were the first two girls killed in the same way?”

“Yes. They were strangled, raped, no DNA, no weapon, no witness — and like I said, my girl remains unidentified.”

“Both found beside motorways?”

“Yep.”

“And the first victim was a prostitute?”

“Yes. She worked the service stations, picking up lorry drivers, doing the business in their cabs, and then often getting dropped off at the next service station along the M1 to find new clients before heading back to the first.”

Anna stood watching while photographs were being taken of the victim and the area, before a tent was erected around the dead girl.

It was two hours later before they arrived at the incident room. This had been set up at the police station closest to the crime scene, in a new building in Hendon, North London, with an entire floor given over to the murder team. Already a group of technicians were setting up the desks and computers. Anna was pleased to see she’d be joined by DCs Barbara Maddox and Joan Falkland. Mike Lewis and Paul Barolli had also worked with the women on previous cases, and it promised to be a friendly atmosphere.

“Nice to see you again,” Barbara said to Anna as she prepared the incident-room board.

“Long time. I’ve been on three other cases,” Anna told her.

“Joan and I have sort of stuck with Mike and Paul.” Barbara nodded over to Joan.

“Were you on the other murders Mike told me about?” Anna asked.

“Yes, both of us were. I’m going to get the board set up with all the previous case details, as apparently, this one looks like it’s got the same MO.”

Anna shrugged, since until they had the postmortem report, they wouldn’t know for sure.

“Mike said she was very young,” Barbara commented.

Anna nodded. She was taking her time arranging her own desk, relieved to have such new equipment at hand.

“They’ve got a terrific canteen,” Joan informed her as she wheeled in a trolley stacked with the old case files.

Anna had time to sample the canteen at lunch, and it was not until early afternoon that she began to select files to catch up on the two earlier cases. By now the board was filling up with photographs and details. Anna still felt they might be presuming too much without confirmation. Although the victim had been removed to the local mortuary for a postmortem, Anna was told they would have to wait twenty-four hours before they would get any further details.

Meanwhile, Mike Lewis had set up his office, and Barolli had installed himself at the desk opposite Anna. “How’s life been treating you?” Barolli asked affably.

“Okay — I’ve worked a few other cases. How about you?”

“Well, we’ve been on the other two for about a year, and then I went on to something else over at Lambeth.”

“So to all intents and purposes, the cases were shelved?”

“Yeah. Without getting one of the victims identified, it was tough. The first one” — Barolli turned to gesture to a photograph — “was Margaret — or Maggie — Potts, aged thirty-nine, string of previous arrests for prostitution, drug addict, and known to work the service stations. We had no handbag, no witness, but got her ID’d from fingerprints. She was raped and strangled.”

Anna looked at the mug shot posted up. Maggie Potts had been a dark-eyed, sullen-faced woman, her bleached-blond hair with an inch of black regrowth.

When she sifted through the crime-scene photographs, she could see the similar pattern. Potts’s body had been dumped in a field not far from the M1 motorway. She had been wearing fishnet stockings, which were torn, and her shoes were found beside her body. She had on a short red jacket and a black skirt that was drawn up to her waist, and her knickers had been ripped apart. The satin blouse was stained with mud and wrenched open to reveal a black brassiere.

Anna glanced at the thick files representing the hundreds of interviews with people questioned about the last sightings of Maggie Potts. The team had interviewed call girls, service-station employees — from the catering staff to the petrol-station attendants — lorry drivers, and others in an endless round of inquiries and statements.

“This is the one we never identified,” Barolli said, tapping the second victim’s photograph. “We tried, but whatever we put out came back with fuck-all. We had her picture on the TV crime programs, in missing-persons magazines — you name it, we tried it to find out who she was — but with no luck. She was a pretty little thing, too.”

Anna turned her gaze on the Jane Doe, and as Barolli had said, she was exceedingly pretty, with long dark hair down to her shoulders, bangs, a pale face with wide-apart blue eyes, and full lips. She didn’t look jaded or hard; on the contrary, she looked innocent.

“How old was she?”

Barolli said they couldn’t be certain but had her aged between twenty to thirty.

“Looks younger, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, that’s what made it so tough to deal with, that no one came forward, no one recalled seeing her at any of the service stations. According to the postmortem, her body was very bruised, and there were signs of sexual activity suggesting she was raped. She was also strangled. She had nothing on her — no bag, no papers, nothing. If you think we made extensive inquiries on that old slag Potts, with this girl we tried every which way to find out who she was — Interpol, colleges, universities, but after six months we flatlined.”

Anna looked over the details of the young woman’s clothes. They were good labels, stylish but not new, and she had been wearing black ballet-type shoes; she had tiny feet, a size three.

“I hope to Christ we get this new girl identified,” Barolli said quietly.

“You reckon the same killer did both previous cases?”

He shrugged. “Same MO, but who knows without any DNA? Only thing we got was a few carpet fibers, but where she came from, who she was, how she came to be murdered are still unknown.”

“Did you check out the Jane Doe’s clothes?”

“What do you think?” Barolli glared. “Of course we did, but it didn’t help. We actually traced where the shoes came from, but they sold thousands.”

“Yeah, they were quite fashionable a year or so ago; now it’s all stacked heels.”

Anna continued to read the files all afternoon, but when it got to five-thirty and there still had been no word from the mortuary, she went home. It was quite a drive from the station to her flat over at Tower Bridge, and although it had not been a particularly tough day’s work, she felt tired. She meant to read up on more details about the previous cases but instead watched some TV before going to bed. There was nothing on the news about their victim. Anna sincerely hoped she would not turn out to be another murdered girl who would remain unidentified.